Re: Revenge on the Nerds -Maureen on a rampage

[Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>]

Igor Chudov @ home writes:
> 

> > to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL
> > that looks like
> > 
> > valueclick.com
> > bannermall.com
> > adforce.*.com/
> > bannerweb.com
> > eads.com/
> > /*/sponsors/*.gif
> > *banner*.gif
> > /image/ads/
> > 
> > etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and
> > Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users
> > and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
> 
> I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on 
> the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
> 
> There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you
> can take it and modify it.
> 


I've already done the work:
http://www.lne.com/ericm/cookie_jar/

It'll block cookies, accepting them from a specific list of sites. 

It blocks the outgoing requests for ads, on a (regex-controlled)
host or URL basis.  So you don't bother to download ads, saving you
from seeing them and wasting the bandwidth downloading them.

As an example, my .cookiejarrc file currently holds:

denyhost *.doubleclick.net advertising.quote.com commonwealth.riddler.com
denyhost *.linkexchange.com *.pagecount.com images.yahoo.com www.missingkids.org
denyhost ads.*.com ad.*.com adforce.imgis.com www.bannerswap.com
denyhost *.flycast.com/ songline.com:1971/
denyurl /ads/* /ads/images/* *sponsors/redirect/* */bin/statthru* */AdID=*
denyurl /adv/* /sponsors2/*  */ad-bin/ad* /advertising/* */livetopics_anim.gif*
denyurl /Banners/* /shared/images/ad/* /sponsors3/* /adverts/* /free/FarSight/*
denyurl /ad/ /*ad*.focalink.com/


It'll let you selectively block sending the User-agent line
in the HTTP request, and will let you randomly select from a list
of User-agents that you supply if you want to mess up site's data
collection schemes.  And you can choose to block sending anything
but the Accept and Pragma lines in the HTTP request for more privacy.



-- 
Eric Murray  Chief Security Scientist  N*Able Technologies  www.nabletech.com
(email:  ericm  at  lne.com   or   nabletech.com)          PGP keyid:E03F65E5